Spectral Park

Luke Donovan slathers tropicalia, drum machines, and organs over songs that run the gamut from proto-punk to synth pop. On his self-titled Spectral Park debut, the UK songwriter's phonographically enhanced one-man band's desperate words and frantic music make for a technicolored romantic frenzy.

Out on a stroll in the council block housing near his home in Southampton, Luke Donovan happened on a box of beat-up records. Intrigued, he brought his findings home, slapped one down on the turntable, and started strumming. The result of this past-and-present fusion is Spectral Park, the self-titled debut from Donovan's phonographically enhanced one-man band. But if the Spectral Park project got its start on a leisurely afternoon constitutional, the album itself winds up feeling a lot more like one of psychonaut hero Aldous Huxley's wild rides. The push-and-pull between Donovan's high-spirited, straight-outta-1966 psych-pop and the snatches of exotica he applies liberally to Spectral Park's surfaces leaves the album constantly teetering on the edge of chaos. How fitting, then, that Donovan himself, driven almost mad by a romance gone sour, spends Spectral Park sounding every bit as turned-around and twisted as the funhouse mirrors that make up his music.

Well before the needle hits the wax, Donovan throws just about everything you can think of at his songs. His compositions would be plenty wriggly without the salvaged sounds-- waves of tropicalia, drum machine dribble, organs aplenty-- slathered over top. All this, Donovan presents at a pace several clicks above manic; could be Donovan's trying to throw sample snitchers off his trail by playing through his discard pile at an advance speed, but whatever the reason, Spectral Park doesn't leave much time to pause and reflect. Donovan's songs run the gamut from proto-punk to synth-pop, but between its frenetic gait, its thick carpet of harmonies, and its ebullient, every-which-way hooks, Spectral Park winds up feeling closest in spirit to that idyllic moment in the mid-60s when psychedelics had permeated the culture but the hippies could still handle their speed. On the surface, Spectral Park is all smiles: every hook's a gusher, every little noise that floats by another chance at a blown mind. But there's an unease running under Spectral Park's madcap multivalence, a bitter pill only made swallowable by Donovan's candied choruses.

Donovan's the romantic type, but here, he sounds like he's at the end of his rope. Spectral Park begins with a series of pleas-- "Are you tired? Tired of me? Like I'm tired of you? Like I'm tired of this?"-- and goes from there, with Donovan switching off between a kind of doomed idealism and a resignation that whatever this is, it just isn't working. "We've done this all wrong, we talked for too long, betrothed ourselves to eager bad advice," Donovan admits on Spectral Park highlight "Nausea", holding back the bile as best he can. His desperate words and this frantic music make for a kind of technicolored romantic frenzy not unlike of Montreal's Fantasia of self-consciousness circa Hissing Fauna. Donovan's lovelorn streak provides a much-needed dose of reality amidst Spectral Park's gumdrop wonderland, an orientation point in the center of the psychedelic swirl.

When you can make it out, that is. Spectral Park's a wild ride, but all the stuff zipping past your head makes for a lot of motion blur. You might not even notice Donovan's sadsack streak your first few times through Spectral Park, as you'll be too distracted by all the pretty colors, the endlessly transmogrifying hooks, the way every song seems to stumble headlong into the next. Between the spring-loaded choruses, the far-flung samples, and Donovan's chest-clutching lyrics, Spectral Park's got a lot going for it; at times, maybe a little too much. Donovan occasionally seems to be competing with himself for space in the mix, occasionally drowning out his own voice in a sea of crackling samples and peripheral swirl. Halfway through the organ-soaked "Cut", he silences half of his pocket symphony, letting the hook-- not coincidentally, the album's best-- shine through. It's one of just a few moments on Spectral Park where he doesn't seem compelled to dredge up every musical notion he's ever had all at once. But for Donovan, mired in romantic disorder throughout the topsy-turvy Spectral Park, clarity seems a far-off goal. He'll get there eventually; first, he's gotta work through all this chaos.